LTE-Advance Carrier aggregation

Benefits:
- Increase bandwidth
- Increase bitrate
- can be used for both TDD/FDD

Component carrier (CC): each aggregated carrier referred to as component carrier (CC).
Each CC can have bandwidth of 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 or 20 MHz
Maximum 5 CC with 20 MHz ca possible, total 100 MHz
UL/DL aggregated carriers can be different in FDD

Frequency Band Allocation:

Intra-Band: if component carriers are in the same LTE Frequency band.
Contiguous Intra-Band: if component carriers (CC) are continuous frequency band in the same LTE
frequency band.
Non-contiguous band: if frequency are in the same LTE Band but have gaps in between.

Inter-band: if frequencies are from different LTE Bands.

ATBC: Aggregated transmission bandwidth configuration. Total number of aggregated

physical resource block (PRB).

CA Bandwidth class: Indicates maximum number of Bandwidth and CC.

Class A: ATBC 100, maximum number of CC = 1

Class B: ATBC 100, maximum number of CC = 2

Class C: 100 < ATBC 200, maximum number of CC = 2

Operating principle:

In CA there are number of serving cells, one for each component carriers
Coverage of the CC may differ because of the frequency band used
RRC connection is only handled by one cell, the Primary serving cell, served by the Primary component
carrier (DL and UL PCC)
In idle mode the UE listens to system information on the DL PCC
On the UL PCC PUCCH is sent
The other component carriers are all referred to as Secondary component carriers (DL and UL SCC)
SCCs are added and removed as required
PCC only changed in Handover

LTE Protocols on Radio interface: Carrier aggregation influences MAC and PHY layer protocols. Also new RRC
massage introduced.

Changes:
new RRC in order to handle SCC (secondary component carrier)
MAC to handle scheduling on number of CC s.
PHY layer: scheduling on CCs must be provided DL as well as HARQ ACK/NACK per CC must be
delivered UL and DL
Scheduling: There are two main alternative for scheduling in CA.

1. Scheduling grant and resource on the same carriers

2. Cross- carriers scheduling: scheduling grant and resource not the same carrier.

Reference: www.3gpp.org